Hybrid Senior Database Reliability Engineer, PostgreSQL

at Nodal Exchange

• Job title: Senior Database Reliability Engineer, PostgreSQL
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: $150,000 - $170,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Ansible, AWS, Cloud, EC2, ETL, Grafana, Linux, Postgres, Prometheus, Python, SQL, Terraform
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Tysons Corner, United States

About the role

• Database Reliability Engineer managing PostgreSQL infrastructure that underpins transactions at Nodal Exchange. Ensuring data integrity and performance in a regulated financial environment.

Responsibilities

• Production PostgreSQL infrastructure across the full lifecycle: architecture, deployment, replication, monitoring, performance tuning, backup/recovery, and capacity planning
• Streaming replication and high-availability configurations that meet the uptime expectations of a regulated financial exchange
• Query and system-level performance analysis—diagnosing slow queries, optimizing execution plans, tuning shared_buffers, work_mem, and autovacuum, not just reading pg_stat output but knowing what to do about it
• Backup and disaster recovery strategy using tools like Barman, including point-in-time recovery testing and validation
• Data architecture evolution: modernizing data warehouse and reporting infrastructure, building ETL pipelines, and designing data flows that scale with the business
• Data services across the organization: test data management, data obfuscation, data modeling, and supporting data needs for development, QA, and business teams
• Operational support including on-call rotation for after-hours production database emergencies

Requirements

• 5+ years hands-on PostgreSQL administration in production environments—not just dev/test, not just managed RDS
• Deep understanding of PostgreSQL internals: WAL mechanics, MVCC, vacuum processing, the query planner and optimizer, connection handling, and lock management
• Proven experience with physical and logical replication: setup, monitoring, failover, and troubleshooting split-brain scenarios
• Strong SQL performance tuning skills: reading EXPLAIN ANALYZE output, identifying indexing strategies, understanding join algorithms, and resolving locking contention
• Solid Linux systems administration (we run Ubuntu)—comfortable with systemd, filesystem performance, memory management, and networking fundamentals
• Experience with backup/recovery tools (Barman, pgBackRest, or equivalent) and tested disaster recovery procedures
• Experience building and maintaining ETL pipelines and data transformation processes
• Ability to work autonomously in a small team where you’re expected to own problems from identification through resolution
• Strong communication skills—you can explain a replication topology to a developer or a data availability timeline to a business stakeholder
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics, or a related field
• Highly Valued
• Experience operating databases in regulated or financial services environments where uptime and audit trails are non-negotiable
• Hands-on AWS experience (EC2, RDS, S3, networking)—we run a hybrid on-prem/cloud infrastructure
• Infrastructure-as-code skills: Ansible and/or Terraform for automated, repeatable database deployments
• Python scripting for automation, tooling, and data pipeline development
• Experience with data obfuscation and masking techniques for non-production environments
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, pgWatch, or similar)
• Experience with cloud migration—moving database workloads from on-premises to AWS
• Contributions to PostgreSQL community, conference talks, or published writing on database engineering topics

Benefits

• Nodal Employee Benefits and Perks: https://nodalexchange.pinpointhq.com
• E-verify participant